Quote of the Day (Langston Hughes, on the ‘Little Sleep Song’ of April Rain)

“The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.”—African-American poet, librettist, translator, and fiction writer Langston Hughes (1901-1967), “April Rain Song,” originally published in 1921, reprinted in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (1994)
 
I had a somewhat different reaction to overnight rain than Langston Hughes did: I awoke to hear its soft patter outside my window this morning, rather than falling asleep to it.
 
But I recalled that I had just heard yesterday about this poem. It’s a lovely set of verses (only five more lines than you see here) and easy to find on the Internet. I urge anyone who’s never encountered it to look it up.

Quote of the Day (Peter Robinson, on ‘Summer Rain’)

“The rain was still falling, obscuring the higher green dale sides and their latticework of drystone walls. Lyndgarth, a cluster of limestone cottages and a church huddled around a small village green, looked like an Impressionist painting. The rain-darkened ruins of Devraulx Abbey, just up the hill to his left, poked through the trees like a setting for Camelot.

“[Detective Inspector Alan] Banks rolled down his window and listened to the rain slapping against leaves and dancing on the river’s surface. To the west, he could see the drumlin that Jerry Singer had felt so strongly about.

“Today, it looked ghostly in the rain, and it was easy to imagine the place as some ancient barrow where the spirits of Bronze Age men lingered. But it wasn’t a barrow; it was a drumlin created by glacial deposits. And Jerry Singer hadn’t been a Bronze Age man in his previous lifetime; he had been a sixties hippie, or so he believed.”—British-Canadian crime writer Peter Robinson (1950-2022), “Summer Rain,” in Not Safe After Dark and Other Stories (2004)

Looks like in my part of the Northeast, we’re in for another day or so of “summer rain.” The sky has been darkening and rumbling over the last couple of hours. I will be glad that when it’s all over, the landscape won’t resemble what Inspector Banks encounters…

Quote of the Day (Conrad Aiken, With Praise for Rain)

“Beloved, let us once more praise the rain.
Let us discover some new alphabet,
For this, the often praised; and be ourselves,
The rain, the chickweed, and the burdock leaf,
The green-white privet flower, the spotted stone,
And all that welcomes the rain; the sparrow too,—
Who watches with a hard eye from seclusion,
Beneath the elm-tree bough, till rain is done.”— American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, short-story writer, novelist, and critic Conrad Aiken (1889-1973), “Beloved, Let Us Once More Praise The Rain,” in Conrad Aiken: Collected Poems, 1916-1970, Second Edition (1970)

Don’t get me wrong: these are lovely verses, demonstrating the tremendous skill and depth of feeling of Conrad Aiken.

But, after my area of the Northeast was hit with flooded streets and highways Tuesday night—and with even worse forecast for today—I can’t wait “till rain is done” this week.

(By the way, while on vacation 25 years ago, I went out one afternoon to see Bonaventure Cemetery, just east of Savannah. You may recall this resting place as the stunning backdrop for the book and film adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. But it’s also where Aiken and another son of Savannah, Oscar-winning songwriter Johnny Mercer, are buried. I think it’s no coincidence that, coming from this beautiful region, both men included plenty of images of nature in their work.)

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on a Rainy Night)

“Cars licked by on the asphalt, the streetlights overhead burned sulphurously, silhouettes in slickers and parkas once in a while walked by.” — American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), on a rainy night in his hometown of Shillington, PA, in Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989)

I thought of this quote last night, as a gulley formed by a rainstorm poured down my street and the wind lashed against my house. I was grateful to be inside.

Quote of the Day (Somerset Maugham, on ‘Unmerciful’ Tropical Rain)

“Dr. Macphail watched the rain. It was beginning to get on his nerves. It was not like our soft English rain that drops gently on the earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own. And sometimes you felt that you must scream if it did not stop, and then suddenly you felt powerless, as though your bones had suddenly become soft; and you were miserable and hopeless.”—English man of letters W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), “Rain,” originally published in The Smart Set, April 1921, republished as part of Maugham’s short-story collection The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (1921)

These last several days, rain—the lack of it and the overabundance of it alike—has been at the heart of the drumbeat of the news, locally, nationally and internationally. In an age of climate change, the kind of soft, steady rain, falling consistently, that many of us recalled from younger days seems to be, more and more, a thing of the past.

The weather forecasters have taken increasingly to warning we’re in for flooding, particularly after a series of consecutive days of high temperatures coupled with humidity.

Still, no matter how much we brace ourselves, though, those of us in the Northeast are unlikely to be mentally prepared for rain as a “malignancy of the primitive powers of nature” that Maugham evoked in this classic tale of the South Seas.

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on a ‘Thick and Fast’ Early Morning Rain)

“Morning drew on apace. The air became more sharp and piercing, as its first dull hue: the death of night, rather than the birth of day: glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually resolved into their familiar shapes. The rain came down, thick and fast; and pattered, noisily, among the leafless bushes.” — English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837)

Descriptions like this are part of the reason why Dickens has been adapted so often to the screen. All the images and sounds are here, ready for any screenwriter or director to use.

Quote of the Day (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, on ‘Autumn, Heralded by the Rain’)

“Thou comest, Autumn, heralded by the rain,
  With banners, by great gales incessant fanned,
  Brighter than brightest silks of Samarcand,
  And stately oxen harnessed to thy wain!”—American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), “Autumn,” originally published in his The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1845), reprinted in American Poetry, The Nineteenth Century: Volume One—Freneau to Whitman, edited by John Hollander (Library of America, 1993)

 The rain-preceded fall that Longfellow evokes here arrived Monday and yesterday, courtesy of the remnants, up here in the Northeast, of Hurricane Delta. Leaves have not changed color very much yet, but many arrive lie in profusion on the ground already—and that number is certain to grow shortly.

(The image accompanying this post shows the Charles River in Massachusetts, a short walk from Longfellow's home in Cambridge. I took this picture while visiting the area 12 years ago.)

Quote of the Day (Vladimir Nabokov, on Rain)

“How mobile is the bed on these

nights of gesticulating trees

when the rain clatters fast,

the tin-toy rain with dapper hoof

trotting upon an endless roof,

traveling into the past.”— Russian-born American novelist-memoirist-poet Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), “Rain,” in The Portable Nabokov, edited by Page Stegner (1971)

This has been an unusually rainy season. I can’t begin to tell you the number of times, in the wee hours of the morning, I’ve awakened to hear rain on the roof.

Nabokov—much better known, of course, for his scandalous novel Lolita—demonstrates here his facility with a different genre: poetry. I wonder how his work might have turned out if he had pursued poetry as avidly as the novel—or, for that matter, collecting and classifying butterflies?

(I took the attached photo of this rain-slicked street while on vacation nearly three months ago at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York.)

 

Song Lyric of the Day (Bob Dylan, on a Windy, Rainy Night)

“The wind howls like a hammer

The night blows cold and rainy

My love she's like some raven

At my window with a broken wing.”— Bob Dylan, “Love Minus Zero, No Limit,” from his Bringing It All Back Home LP (1965)

Photo of the Day: Drizzle on National Mall, Washington, DC

If this photo feels dreary and miserable, it might be because I felt that way that November day nearly a year and a half ago. I had underestimated the distance on foot between major landmarks in Washington, DC. When I took this photo of the National Mall, then, late in the afternoon, while standing at the door of the National Gallery of Art, my feet felt sore, my clothes were damp, and I felt frustrated that I wouldn’t have anywhere near the time I wanted to explore this museum that day.

In other words, the weather reflected my mood.

Photo of the Day: Waiting Out the Storm, NYC

I had been hearing all day about a major storm coming our way. A few blocks from my office late this afternoon, the long-predicted downpour arrived. I made it across the street from where the musical Hamilton is playing and, with the handful of people in this photo I took, waited for the precipitation to abate.

I can’t say that when it was all over, the storm was worth it: much of the mugginess lingers in the air even several hours later.